Faculty Profile

Joseph Williams

Education: BA, University of California-Berkeley, 1978; MA, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1980; MBA, University of Texas-Austin, 1982; PhD, University of Texas-Austin, 1987. At SPU since 2013.

Joseph Williams was a Microsoft executive and also a professor at Colorado State University. Since 1999, he had held various positions at Sun Microsystems and at Microsoft, where he was managing director of the "Software as a Service Partner" channel, managing 10,000 partners in Microsoft's SaaS (Software as a Service) cloud channel business. Other roles at Microsoft included being chief technology officer (CTO) for Microsoft’s $20 billion enterprise sales organization, CTO for Microsoft’s Global Accounts organization, and running a Microsoft Consulting Services team of solution architects. He has also regularly served as a consultant on IT issues with CEOs and CIOs in Fortune 100 companies.

Prior to that, Dean Williams was a senior director in the Lync product group’s partner engineering team and was responsible for integration engineering of Microsoft’s O365 cloud with service providers as well as for the development and delivery of Lync for Microsoft's cloud partners.

Before his work in the technology industry, Dean Williams spent 10 years as an associate professor of computer information systems in the College of Business at Colorado State University. He has also served on the faculty of the University of Montana, New Mexico State University, and Bucknell University.